Scaling BFD support

Douglas Fischer fischerdouglas at gmail.com
Fri Apr 1 13:44:50 CEST 2022


The question raised by colleague Irene reminded me of a topic that may or
may not be the focus of BIRD's development.

I imagine that the biggest supporters of SMP/Multi-Core/Thread-Safe
evolution on BIRD are Operators of Route-Servers of large IXPs, and
operators of large-scale Route-Reflectors.

Although BFD has its greatest use in the transport network and Underlay, it
is increasingly common to see the use of BFD in BGP Internet.

I'm personally overly excited about what BIRD version 3 is demonstrating in
terms of vertical scalability.

But I keep imagining that, even having scalability in the BGP engine, it is
almost prohibitive to use BFD in a scenario with a thousand BGP Peers.

Is there any view from the IBRD development team for this matter?
Or even... Is there any open project focused on BFD that can address this?

And going a little further... In a quick Brainstorming...
What would be the techniques that could help a Route-Server or
Route-Reflector with a thousand BGP Peers to also support a thousand BFD
sessions effectively and efficiently?
Perhaps resort to some hardware-based off-loading method? Would eBPF help
this in any way?

-- 
Douglas Fernando Fischer
Engº de Controle e Automação
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